Vine Damage Part 2

Vine Damage Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Two cold snaps have possibly caused considerable damage to the wine grape crop but growers are currently watching their vineyards to see how much damage really occurred. Michelle Moyer, assistant professor with WSU-IAREC says they are currently watching for frost problems.

MOYER: Now in terms of spring we’re probably not seeing as much damage in terms of the freeze and frost as say the cherries and other stone fruit crops that are already flowering right now. I know there’s a lot of grapevines in some areas that haven’t even broken bud yet. That’s also quite variable when they actually start to develop in the spring.

She says that due to the cool weather they are about 2 weeks behind schedule which has actually been a good thing.

MOYER: So in some cases somewhat beneficial to some places in terms of freeze and frost damage in that there’s not a lot of shoots or tissue out there to be exposed to cold temperatures. So we’ve been a little bit lucky in that sense for the cold that’s happened these last couple of weeks.

Moyer talks about what this might mean to the fall harvest.

MOYER: There’s some rough ideas. In some cases it totally depends on extent of damage and again, we tend to hear only if people have no damage or a lot of damage so our view on what it’s like out there can sometimes be skewed. So in the case of substantial cold damage if you have severe cold damage what that likely does is it reduces your total yield.

There are some estimates that Washington winegrape growers could lose as much as 10 to 15% due to cold. Only time will tell what the total extent will be to the industry.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.